But that doesn't mean you have to "sell" it in a transfer-of-ownership way. You license it so particular people, who have paid you for this, get exclusive use

But that doesn't mean you have to "sell" it in a transfer-of-ownership way. You license it so particular people, who have paid you for this, get exclusive use of it. Selling it in the usual sense is weird because it means that then people can then go and further sell it to people who might use it in ways you wouldn't have approved of. And maybe you're OK with that, or you really trust the people you're licensing it to, and you want it to be sublicensable. But there's no inherent reason everything has to be sublicensable -- and the transfer-of-ownership paradigm is effectively, "everything is sublicensable". And not just sublicensable, but sublicensable to arbitrarily large degree. And yet this is what seems to have become customary.